Regional elections in Germany: tensions within the Grand Coalition, success of the Greens and AfD. On Sunday in Hesse, regional elections were held to elect new deputies. The results are in line with those of the Bavarian elections of October 14, namely a marked decline for the conservative party (CDU) and its social-democratic partner (SPD), while the AfD Greens and populists have confirmed their rise to power, and are now present in all regional parliaments in Germany. The Chancellor's Party and the SPD led with 28% and 20% of the votes respectively, but both lost 10 points compared to the previous election in 2013.According to various reports in the press, Germany’s Angela Merkel will quit as head of her Christian Democratic party after almost two decades. She intends to stay on as chancellor and step down when her current term ends in 2021.

In Brazil, the far right won the presidential election. With 55.15% of the vote, Jair Bolsonaro became the new president of Brazil. He will take up his duties on January 1, 2019 at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia and succeed Michel Temer, who is leaving office with a level of historical unpopularity, leaving behind him a country in bad shape. The reactions were varied, Marine le Pen welcomed Mr Bolsonaro's victory on Twitter and wished him "good luck [...] in redressing Brazil's highly compromised economic, security and democratic situation". On the other hand, some are more concerned, such as Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, Secretary of State to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, who calls for a "powerful Europe in the face of the rise of extremes, whether from the extreme right or the extreme left everywhere in the world".

White House is said to brace for GOP losses and staff exodus. White House officials are largely resigned to losing Republican control of the U.S. House and are bracing for an exodus of staff worried about a torrent of subpoenas from Democratic congressional investigators, according to Bloomberg. 

Presentation of a post-Brexit budget. Chancellor Philip Hammond is due to present a post-Brexit budget to Parliament on Monday, in which economic forecasts and budgetary guidelines will be drawn up, even as the Brexit negotiations are still at a deadlock, five months before the United Kingdom's official exit from the EU.

In other news. On Friday, Standard & Poor's downgraded the outlook for Italian debt from stable to negative. The Central Bank of Russia maintained its main key policy rate at 7.5%, after raising it in September for the first time since its 2014 monetary crisis. Iran sold its oil to private buyers (rather than countries) via an energy exchange on Sunday for the first time, to avoid US monitoring and an export ban.